I’ve watched a lot of TV this year. I wake up in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, and sit down to watch television until my eyes go square in their sockets. It’s a quotidian world of ticking time bombs, raunchy rutting, and liberally littered laughs.
The following 10 shows represent my favourites from the past 12 months. Some were watched for work and some were watched for pleasure, but all were immensely enjoyable. In a year dominated by two blockbuster fantasy shows – HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon and Amazon’s Tolkien epic The Rings of Power – the work I enjoyed most erred on the side of the irreverent. Funny, cynical, moving, thrilling; there’s a little of everything on this list.
But before we get into it, I think it’s important to recognise my biases: competently assembled though many of these shows are, I am never going to feature a Star Wars or Marvel endeavour on a list of my personal favourites. After all, personal taste is what adds flavour to life. And from sci-fi to reality TV, prestige drama to documentary, these 10 shows were mouth-watering additions to the menu in 2022.
10. Stranger Things
Television designed for a teenage audience – and immortalisation in looped videos on TikTok – tends not to be very good. Just look at Wednesday, the slapdash Gen Z-baiting Addams Family origin story racking up monster viewing figures right now. But Stranger Things is not like that. Stranger Things is… good.
Well-written, well-acted, and beautifully mounted in a rural Indiana that feels ripped from the pages of Stephen King or John Irving, Stranger Things’s penultimate season was the best serial killer mystery since the cancellation of Mindhunter. All the more impressive, then, for the fact that it really needn’t have been anything that good.
9. I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
I hadn’t watched a season of I’m a Celeb for many years. Last I knew, it was people like Tony Blackburn and Katie Price in the jungle. But I, like so many of the British public, tuned in this year for one simple reason: I wanted to see Matt Hancock eat bugs.
And, over the course of those few weeks, I became utterly obsessed with the show. There was a sense of catharsis, after the horrors of Covid-19, to see the former health secretary in the pillory, subjected to public retribution for the mistakes of the pandemic. As the weeks wore on, however, it became less about Hancock, and more about the inherent sweetness of Jill Scott and Owen Warner, and the unageing industry of Ant and Dec. Truly, both the show and its presenters are now a British institution.
8. Bad Sisters
The premise of Apple’s Sharon Horgan-led dark comedy is simple and delicious: four (bad) sisters decide to murder the husband of the remaining, fifth, sister. That undertaking then unravels in increasingly absurd and pitch-black ways, reminiscent of the very best of Ealing comedy slapstick.
Horgan is enormously talented, and assembled a brilliant cast here (Eve Hewson is a revelation as flighty youngest sister Becka, and Claes Bang is chilling as impending cadaver John Paul). The show is by turns a funny, affectionate look at the sibling micro-society, and a much more sober portrait of domestic violence and coercive control. At the final moment, the show fluffs its lines, delivering a fudge of a finale, but otherwise it is a fine piece of new television.
7. Slow Horses
Slow Horses, Apple’s adaptation of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb spy books, has released two seasons in 2022 alone, which is a level of industry not usually correlated with quality. Don’t worry though: Herron is the natural successor to John Le Carré, and Lamb the only heir to George Smiley.
The first season looked at far-right terrorism and radicalisation – it would make a good double-bill with Channel 4’s The Drop-in, which was also very good – and set up a world of exquisite crumminess. Nothing typifies that more than Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb; an Oscar-winning star, farting and belching his way through a spy drama. But the greatest trick that Slow Horses pulls off, is to feel cerebral without being remotely complicated.
Dodgy business: the cast of ‘Severance’
6. Louis Theroux: Forbidden America
If you’re not sick to death of the lanky bespectacled presenter, then 2022’s Forbidden America marked a big return to form for Louis Theroux (and is hugely better than his diabolical interview series, where he meets luminaries like Rita Ora and Bear Grylls).
Episodes charted the online success of the far-right, Florida’s violent rap scene, and the changing face of porn, all with customary wit and curiosity. The BBC is a very able maker of documentaries – Frozen Planet II could also have featured on this list, having become a key part of how I hypnotise my brain to sleep – but in the post-Paxman era, they have very few personalities who can carry a show like Theroux. He has swiftly become British factual television’s most important foreign export since David Attenborough.
5. The English
Theroux’s latest documentary investigates Florida’s violent rap scene
Jennifer Coolidge in ‘The White Lotus’
